The second India Innovation Initiative (i3) Awards were given away on Monday at the IIT-Delhi campus. The event witnessed more than 50 participants,selected from over 900 entries from all over the country. iCon,an intelligent power conditioner developed by Shwetank Jain of P2 Power Solutions,an IIT Kharagpur start-up,won the first prize. Nandan Kumar,Sudarshan Rajagopalan and Sankamesh Ramaswamy won the second prize for developing an automated machine to manufacture three-dimensional non-woven fibrous structure as a better alternative for cotton balls used for medical applications. The i3 is a collaborative project of the Department of Science and Technology of the Government of India,the Confederation of Indian Industries and Agilient Technologies. Micro-visionary Mahesh Rajaram Atale is a botanist working in a Mumbai-based pharmaceutical company,which means peering for long hours into a microscope. My eyes hurt so much. I had to do something about it, he says. First he tried taking photos of a magnified object by placing his digital camera on top of the eyepiece. Later,he would transfer the photos onto his computer for analysis. Then it struck him: why not try to view the digital images real-time? So,Atale conjured up a device using the zoom lens of a camera and a camera sensor. The device can be mounted on a normal microscope,and when a microscopes objective is screwed to it and the device connected to a computer,images can be viewed. The innovator claims his device magnifies objects 2.5 times more than a normal microscope,thanks to the zoom lens. Atale has also tweaked the device to have an in-built micron ruler to help take measurements. Another version features a tiny LCD screen on top of the microscope. Atales dream: to create a Rs-1000 microscope that can be used by children. Liquid dispenser Satish Vishu Pathak struggles to find a way to explain his innovation,Samiep Liquid Dispensing Technology: a digitally controlled precise dispensing valve for liquids under gravity flow,until he hits upon a parallel in the everyday world. When the man at the kirana store weighs sugar,he puts in a large chunk that is smaller than the required quantity first,then adds progressively smaller parts to it. The last part could be as small as a pinch, he says. Pathaks Samiep does the same to liquids. The innovation is designed to replace pipes of various sizes used to dispense oil,water,milk etc in industries,with a single pipe. Conventionally,a large pipe dispenses most of the required liquid,after which a smaller,more accurate,pipe is used. Samiep uses a large pipe to dispense most of the liquid in one go. The flow is then cut off,and the precise amount of liquid is released from the pipe in spurts. While other systems cost around Rs 4.5 crore for a large industrial house,Pathak estimates his system will cost around Rs 1 crore. He also claims his innovation is close to perfectly accurate,better than the 0.1 per cent error of conventional systems. Sensing plant diseases When Bhushan Gurmukhdas Jagyasi corrects you that his system is not just sensor-based,but a sensor and human participation-based plant disease forecasting system,he talks of the essence of his work. Jagyasi,a scientist at Mumbais TCS Innovation Labs,has succeeded in bringing into reckoning the factor that was missing from agriculture: humans. Sensors collect weather and soil details so that pre-existing mathematical models can be used to predict the occurrence of a disease. Farmers are also asked questions about the health of their crop so that a warning can be issued if a disease is afoot. The questions are so formulated that answers are either Yes or No. Asked in local languages,the questions are about the symptoms exhibited by the plant. They are then sent to farmers mobile phones using the mKRISHI application developed separately at the TCS Innovation Labs,and are accompanied by pictures. Farmers also have the option of clicking and sending photos of diseased plants through phones to the team of scientists. Controlling irrigation K Swarna Rekhas final-year engineering project can put many projects by professionals to shame. The teachers of Andhra Pradeshs Padmasri Dr B V Raju Institute of Technology asked their students to design their final-year projects keeping in mind the agricultural population at their campus. Swarna Rekhas idea for an automatic irrigation control system was so good that the college funded her pilot project,which has been running for seven months now. Multiple wireless soil moisture sensors are buried in a farmland,which send out data to a control device installed nearby. The control device collates data,and if the amount of water in the soil is less than the optimum level,sends an SMS to the farmers mobile phone. The SMS informs the farmer about the soil moisture level,and asks permission to start pumping water. The farmer can respond either through a keyword or voice both the SMS and voice keyword have been set to start. The water pump at his land is programmed to respond to the signal,and start pumping water. When the soil moisture sensors detect that enough water has been pumped in,the motor is switched off by the programme.
